GeForce RTX graphics card owners have undoubtedly noticed the scarce level of support for ray tracing, but a lot more games could soon benefit from the tech with the news that the Unreal Engine has just adopted it.

To be precise, the latest preview of Unreal Engine 4 (version 4.22) now incorporates ray tracing.

The release notes state that a low-level layer has been implemented on top of UE DirectX 12 which “provides support for DXR and allows creating and using ray tracing shaders (ray generation shaders, hit shaders, etc) to add ray tracing effects”.

A plethora of high-level ray tracing features are listed as supported including reflections, reflected shadows, soft shadows, ambient occlusion, real-time global illumination, translucency, and more. For the full list, check the notes here.

Unreal support

With support built into the Unreal Engine, developers using the tech for their games can make use of ray tracing, so the hope is that we shall see a vastly expanded catalogue of titles which play nice with Nvidia’s RTX cards in this respect.

Games which support ray tracing are currently thin on the ground, although EA has introduced it to Battlefield V – along with DLSS, which promises massive frame rate boosts – plus Metro Exodus has also got support for both these technologies in the latest GeForce drivers from Nvidia (418.91). Metro Exodus is out tomorrow, although we’ve already reviewed it here (sadly, it’s not all good news).

However, there are notable absences from the initial promised line-up back at the launch of Nvidia’s RTX cards, such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which still doesn’t benefit from ray tracing (or DLSS, which it’s also supposed to be getting).

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